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Denver and the West

Town gets Snippy about skeleton of mutilated horse

Posted:
12/09/2006 01:00:00 AM MST

Updated:
12/10/2006 12:50:09 AM MST

Alamosa

She stands quietly at the back of an empty room inside Dell's Insurance Agency just off the main street. She is little more than bones and big shiny teeth. And she is at the center of a controversy involving an eBay auction, lawyers and ownership rights.

Here you might ask the obvious question: What the heck is Nicole Richie doing in a vacant room in an insurance office in a small Colorado potato town?

The bones, of course, are not those of the cracker-nibbling Hollywood actress. They are the bones of Snippy, a horse that - depending on who you talk to - was A) ravaged by creepy aliens from a UFO in a bizarre animal mutilation experiment 39 years ago or B) shot in the behind by a couple of gun-toting teenagers who were all liquored up.

Another possibility involves aliens beaming themselves across the galaxy in some type of molecular reconstruction vehicle, landing on Harry King's ranch just north of town, shooting Snippy in the buttocks with a rifle and then vanishing back into the stars, although frankly that scenario seems a little far-fetched.

Snippy, a 3-year-old Appa loosa, died in a meadow in the middle of the night early in September 1967. Some people said there was no blood around the carcass. Sheriff's investigators and veterinarians studied the case and determined positively, without question, that Snippy was dead all right.

They didn't agree on anything else.

But the alien mutilation theory hung around like Leonard Nimoy at a Star Trek convention.

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Alamosa veterinarian Wallace Leary was so intrigued by the idea that extraterrestrials had whacked the horse that in 1968 he had Snippy's skeleton mounted on a metal platform, her bones held together by wires and screws.

In that condition, Snippy traveled around the San Luis Valley town. She spent a few years on the sidewalk in front of the Chamber of Commerce. She was in a museum for a while. She ended up in an abandoned house on Carl Heflin's ranch for as long as two decades.

No one seems to know how Heflin obtained the horse bones. They do know he liked to collect things. He had, for example, two railroad cars resting on his property. One was filled with fiberglass shower stalls. The other boxcar was stuffed full of doors.

But Heflin died in 2003. He left the shower stalls, the vast collection of doors and Snippy to a beneficiary, reportedly a nephew. A few months ago Snippy was dusted off. Heflin heirs wondered what the skeleton might be worth. Someone mentioned eBay, the Internet auction site that makes it possible, perhaps, to purchase a chunk of Babe Ruth's earwax.

Frank Duran, a marketing specialist with Dell's Insurance, was hired to sell the skeleton. The minimum bid would be $50,000.

Huh?

"Snippy was the very first horse thought to be involved in alien mutilations," Duran said as he led a reporter through the insurance office and into the room where Snippy stood on her platform. "Maybe she was abducted by aliens. Maybe she was the first."

Then Duran moved to the horse's rump and pointed out a pair of indentations and fragmented bones.

"A vet said those are bullet wounds," Duran said. "The sheriff thought maybe a couple of local kids did it. Who knows, really. A lot of people still believe the UFO story."

What does Duran think? Well, he thinks a horse that died during freaky medical experimentation by aliens from a universe far, far away is worth a lot more on eBay than a horse that was shot in the rump.

The auction was set to begin last week. The Valley Courier newspaper in Alamosa made the announcement.

Suddenly, a lot of people began laying claim to Snippy. Relatives of the late Nellie Lewis, the woman who owned the living Snippy, said they still owned the skeleton. And the Alamosa Chamber of Commerce hired an attorney and argued the bones were given to the chamber decades ago.

On Friday, Chamber of Commerce president Debora Goodman started a Save Snippy fund. "I'm going to put up a fight to get Snippy," she said. "She's an icon to this valley. It's important that she stay here and represent that mysterious period in our history."

Sylvia Lobato writes for the Valley Courier. Her mother was Nellie Lewis' best friend.

"I remember the day in '67 when Nellie called our house," Lobato said. "My mother got off the phone and said, 'Flying saucers killed Nellie's horse."'

Lobato, her mother and others rushed out to the ranch.

"From the neck up that horse was peeled. It was just pure white bones," she said. "The horse had only been dead for a night but it looked like it had been dead for months.

"Nellie was there with us and she found a piece of metal next to the horse. It was covered in horse hair. When she picked it up it burned her hand and she screamed and dropped it. Her hand was badly burned. I was there. I saw it."

Down the street at the insurance office, Frank Duran said he hoped the legal dust would settle so he could get on with the eBay auction. In the big room that will soon be home to the accounting department, he glanced at the reassembled bones of the Appaloosa.

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